L.— EDUCATION. 203 



education should include other types of post-primary schools, with 

 curricula varying according to both the age up to which the majority of 

 pupils will remain at school and the different interests and utilities of the 

 pupils to which the bias and objective of each school will normally be 

 related.' They envisage, therefore, besides the secondary schools of 

 literary and scientific type, selective central schools with a four-year 

 course, and a practical trend in the last two, non-selective central schools, 

 which may exist either by themselves in some areas, or in other areas 

 side by side with the selective schools, and a variety of other arrangements, 

 which I think they only insert in their report because they realise that 

 there must be a temporary period of makeshifts. Quite rightly, as I 

 think, they do not believe that this system, if established, would hamper 

 or cripple our already existing secondary schools, for the desire for educa- 

 tion, once it is established, grows of itself. Quite rightly they realise 

 that the education of adolescence is something wider than that which is 

 given through books alone, and the new schools, while they begin with 

 their eleven-year-old pupils in much the same way as the secondary 

 schools, will always seek to develop the hand and the eye, and in their 

 last two years will develop a practical bias. 



There is an immense gap which the promoters of this report seek to 

 fill, and only those who have studied facts and figures know how large it 

 is, so large, indeed, that it prevents us from making any claim at present 

 that we have a system of education which deserves to be called national. 

 In any one year the total school population is very slightly above 700,000. 

 At the age of 14+ there are at least 300,000 children who are outside the 

 system altogether, and receiving no continued instruction ; at the age 

 of 15 -f this figure has risen to 520,000. This means that the effort and 

 the money which have been devoted to the training of those children 

 up to the age of 14 are in very considerable measure wasted ; and though 

 I have not time to argue it now, or to advance the evidence, here in this 

 gap may be found the reasons for much of the unemployment, and still 

 more of the unemployability, which exist within our society to-day. It 

 is of the most vital importance that those years of adolescence should be 

 safeguarded by all that is of inspiration and of good report. Which of us 

 would willingly allow a child of his own to pass to the work of the world 

 at this age without further help ? Not one of us. It is not a question 

 of the interest of employers, or of the interest of parents ; it is a question 

 of the interest of the child, and of the nation, whose main wealth is the 

 men and women which it produces. And since, if it were a matter of the 

 interest of our own children, we could only answer that question in one 

 way, it seems to me a plain matter of social duty to strive to bring it 

 about that the same safeguards and help should exist for all, and that we 

 shall not continue to neglect a full half of the children who are born into 

 our country. 



But before I pass from the region of primary education there are a 

 few further points which I should like to make, though I must make them 

 briefly. We take our children into school at the age of five, a year earlier 

 than any other country, and after a good deal of past blundering we have 

 developed in many of our infant schools institutions which seem to me to 

 be of peculiar merit. In them the children are active, not passive, happy, 



